Technical Writing

I have struggled with the concept of technical writing for 3 years now. Our focus in 9th grade is supposed to be technical writing. At first, I thought that meant creating workplace documents - resumes, letters, brochures, memos, etc. Then, my principal told me that wasn't it; it was about explaining things. So how is that different than expository writing? Well, I don't completely know, but what I do know is that I have a great idea for a technical writing assignment. I'm going to have my students create their own stop-action-animation videos like the ones at commoncraft.com to explain a concept they've learned this year in science, social studies, or math. And I'm going to have them post it to youtube. I think this will be a great opportunity for students to plan out an explanation and have a real audience for the finished product. And it will be a cross-curricular activity which I hardly ever do. I'm pretty pumped about it. We'll see how it goes. Here's an example of one of the videos: http://www.commoncraft.com/wikipedia-video